We’re more connected to the rest of the world than ever before in human history, which is obvious at first glance, but has some interesting repercussions that I was ruminating on this afternoon. There is nothing stopping a person in one part of the world communicating with someone at a distant location, assuming that they are in the so-called “developed” world. People play online games against other people who are halfway around the world, and don’t think much of it. I know people from all over the world - well, maybe not all over the world, but certainly from a lot more places than someone in my situation would have had the benefits of knowing just a decade or two ago.

The other side of this situation is that it’s very easy to miss out on significant happenings around the world, simply by being focused on other things when they occur. The recent riots in Michigan escaped my notice for two days, simply because I hadn’t seen it in the news. I don’t get the paper, and I don’t watch the nightly news (unless you count “The Daily Show” but then I haven’t seen that this week either) The sites that I get my news from didn’t have that on their radar - it had either been bumped by other newsworthy events on the general news sites that I read, or just had never shown up, due to the tight focus on other news sites that I read.

On the one hand, the riots in Michigan don’t directly affect me, so I could very well have gone without hearing about them, and not noticed. On the other hand, I think those events, and what led up to them are important things to know about. The trick is - how do I get the news that I’m interested in without having to sift through the crap that I’m not.

I use a portal site (which I am not going to link to, because I’m not that thrilled with it) which aggregates a bunch of news categories onto one page, customized just for me. I used to have the “World Top Headlines” on my page, but found myself not even bothering to read them, since they quite often weren’t very interesting topics to me. I subsequently took that section off of my portal (as well as a bunch of other sections that I skipped) because I had too many categories selected already, and was missing out on stories that I was truly interested in just because of the clutter. I guess what I’m saying is that I need to find a new source for my customized news needs :-)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Okay people, go home now. Nothing to see here. O…my God! A Firey plane crash! Crowd around everyone! Come on, don’t be shy, crowd around!” - Chief Wiggum